From the earliest days of the
Puritans, the animalwelfare movement in America, like so many other
movements of liberation and social reform, was driven by people of
faith.

But in our own time, mainstream
religion has tended to ignore our fellow creatures.

In our continuing series about
animals in religion, Best Friends executive director Paul Berry, who
grew up in the evangelical Christian tradition, argues that it’s time
for the church to recapture the initiative and treat kindness to animals
as one of the moral imperatives of our time.

When I was four years old, I saw someone do the unthinkable –
something so wrong that I blocked it from my memory until my brother
reminded me about it years later.

We were at our house in New Orleans, playing under the carport
with some puppies our dog had just had. She was a street dog, a
sweet stray we’d named Skipper.

A man and a woman were arguing nearby.

Visibly angry, the man got in his car and sped down the driveway.

My brother and I screamed, “Don’t go yet! Don’t go yet!”

But the man was upset and mad, and he went anyway. He knowingly
ran over three of the puppies.

That man was my father.

He was a troubled individual, and I’ve long since forgiven him.

But such displays of rage and violence are scattered throughout
my childhood memories.

Thanks to my mother, I don’t look back on my youth with any grief
or sadness. She did a good job of making us kids feel safe and
loved. A devout Christian woman, she introduced us to faith and
prayer as a refuge for our struggling family. She upheld the life of
Jesus as the ideal role model: courageous, kind and merciful.

Nonviolent.

Mercy and nonviolence came naturally to us kids. My brother,
sisters and I were always bringing home some lost pet or other.

Seems we always had a house full of animals, and everyone was
considered part of the family.

We were raised in the Southern Baptist tradition, and Sunday was
reserved for church and family. If we missed going to church, Mom
would make us all watch a church service on TV. Her favorite
preachers were Oral Roberts and Robert Schuler. I liked Oral Roberts
because he always began his service by saying, “Something good is
going to happen to you.” We all needed to hear that. But Robert
Schuler was my favorite. With his booming voice and theatrical
flair, he’d say audacious things like “Every problem is a
possibility
in disguise” and “Every person is a gold mine of hidden
possibilities!”

He was fun to watch, but he also had an empowering message
of hope and personal transformation. And being my father’s son, I
needed to believe I could find goodness in myself.

With all the spiritual influences around me, I came to believe
that you could create that goodness in yourself by doing good in the
world – caring for all that God has given us: the animals, the
Earth, and each other.

But I can’t say church leaders helped shape my reverence and
respect for animals and nature. That was personal.

“ We’re
all born with an innate sense
of reverence for animals and nature that
the church should be fostering.”

Nature and nurture

Today, with kids of my own, I’m
convinced that we’re all born with an innate sense of reverence and
responsibility for animals and the earth; kids just need reassurance
from their parents and role models.

It’s also clear that the concept of caring for all of nature is
becoming more and more a concern for people all over the country,
regardless of their faith or philosophy.

Last summer, when Best Friends commissioned a nationwide
poll, we discovered that 89 percent of Americans agree that “we have
a moral obligation to protect the animals in our care.”

That’s an astounding consensus. But how does it relate to people
of faith?

In an informal survey of Best Friends members following the
national poll, we asked them what their churches, temples and
synagogues are talking about with respect to animals and morality,
and how their religious leaders are teaching their congregations to
act on those.

The answer: Beyond the human species – ourselves – God’s
creation is barely talked about at all.

So if this moral obligation toward our fellow creatures is such a
core moral value for people, why isn’t it upheld by our churches?

The evangelical movement prides itself on taking strong positions
on moral issues. And congregations look to their churches for
leadership. But the churches aren’t setting much of an example on
the subject of kindness to animals.

So is it any surprise that we’re not seeing much follow-through
from the congregations?

For myself, I long ago gave up even expecting to hear anything
meaningful from the pulpit about the importance of protecting
animals.

And many people I used to go to church with and still meet
up with occasionally tell me the same thing. We want our children to
grow up in the church, but we want it to address all aspects of
moral responsibility.

And if most of us are indeed born with an innate, God-given
sense of moral responsibility, then surely it is the church’s
business to foster this responsibility and remind us of it into our
adulthood.

Instead, it all gets lost along the way.

Worse, many of our members told us, their churches have become so
politically organized, so focused on narrow wedge
issues, that they have pretty much lost sight of the big picture
stuff – universal kindness, compassion, mercy and nonviolence.

So it should come as no surprise that when the churches start
leaving their congregations, the congregations start leaving the
churches. The Washington Post reported last summer that since 2000,
more than 20 million Americans have left traditional churches to
explore alternative venues of worship, including home churches,
workplace ministries and online faith communities. And in early
October, the New York Times reported that evangelical Christian
leaders are warning one another that their teenagers are abandoning
the faith in droves.

“Inasmuch as you have done it to the least
of these …”

The founders of Christianity had a bold vision for a universal
church built on the Golden Rule as spelled out in the Beatitudes.

But with so much of its focus on issues that have more to do with
Caesar than with God, much of the church that I grew up in has lost
its sense of divine mission.

That mission should be to care for all creation: the animals,
the Earth and each other. And if more Christians demanded that level
of moral scope of their leaders, the church would be out in front on
causes that relate to the animals and nature, ranging from
environmental protection to animal welfare.

Just for starters, we should be demanding no-kill policies for
homeless animals in our communities. And we should be fighting
against the fur trade, factory farming and sport hunting, too. Those
are profoundly immoral and sinful enterprises – meaning that they
are about inflicting suffering and death upon God’s creatures in
pursuit of nothing more than human vanity, profit and entertainment.

But there’s not nearly enough discussion in church on these
issues, and certainly not enough encouragement to go out into
society and campaign against such injustices.

People want to have those meaningful conversations. But in the
follow-up to our national survey last year, we learned that most
people of faith who are practicing compassion for animals are doing
it in spite of the message they get from their religious
institutions.

Reclaiming the agenda

In the last few years, many advances for animals have been
made in the political arena. And much of that progress has been
driven by the animal rights movement. As a result, Congress and
local politicians are increasingly sensitive to the concerns of
people who care about animals.

But meanwhile, the churches continue to treat concern for animals
as a non-issue. Worse yet, the world of animal “rights” is often
shunned by the evangelical movement as being “liberal” – even
atheistic.

It may be true that some of the early adopters of the modern
animal rights movement were non-religious – in some cases, even
anti-religious. But much of that has to be seen in the light of the
shocking lack of interest from the churches.

The truth is that the modern animal rights movement takes its
inspiration from a great tradition of social reform that encompasses
the history of this nation, from the Puritans to Martin Luther King,
Jr. In 1641, for example, section 92 of the Body of Liberties
adopted by the Massachusetts Bay Colony stated, “No man shall
exercise any Tyrranny or Crueltie towards any bruite Creature which
are usuallie kept for man’s use.”

And in 1776, when the founding fathers of our country were
engaged in declaring that “all men are … endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness,” the Anglican minister Rev. Humphrey
Primatt published his Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and the Sin
of Cruelty to Brute Animals, in which he wrote:

“Pain is pain, whether it is inflicted on man or on beast; and
the creature that suffers it, whether man or beast, being sensible
of the misery of it whilst it lasts, suffers Evil …

“We may pretend to what religion we please, but cruelty is
atheism.

“We may boast of Christianity, but cruelty is infidelity.

“We may trust our orthodoxy, but cruelty is the worst of
heresies.”

Certainly, in our own time, there are voices in a comparative
wilderness, speaking out for kindness to animals from a faith-based
perspective. One who captured the public attention in 2002 was
Matthew Scully, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush,
who left the White House to write Dominion: The Power of Man, the
Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. A practicing Catholic,
Scully says that “It is usually best in any moral inquiry to start
with the original motivation, which in the case of animals we may
without embarrassment call love.”

More than ever, it’s time for people of faith to take ownership
of the animal cause – if not necessarily as an issue of “rights,”
then certainly as one of core spiritual values: kindness,
compassion, mercy, nonviolence and love.

For many of us, it is easier to promote rational arguments for
animal justice. But, in the final analysis, our motivation is about
something entirely irrational: love. We love them as our family, and
they love us back unconditionally.

Is there any cause more noble for the Christian than to honor the
blessing of love in this life?

Fair Use Notice: This document
may contain copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized
by the copyright owners. We believe that this
not-for-profit, educational use on the Web constitutes a fair use of the
copyrighted material (as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law).
If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go
beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.